Cisco's (Nasdaq: CSCO) ongoing company identity realignment continues this week as the struggling router vendor has named Juniper (NYSE: JNPR) executive David Yen to run its server access and virtualization technology (SAVTG) unit.
Yen will take over the unit's duties from Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero, the trio that founded of Nuova Systems, which Cisco acquired in 2008 and thus created the SAVTG unit.
Mazzola, Jain and Cafiero will continue to work for Cisco in advisory roles.
The SAVTG division, which includes Cisco's Unified Computing System and the Nexus family of data center switches are targeted at the burgeoning data center and cloud computing trend championed by large incumbent carriers such as Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and now CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) with its impending acquisition of Savvis. Cisco's bet on the data center market continues to pay off with sales of the Nexus 5000 growing 56 percent year over year in Q2 Cisco's fiscal year 2011, while Nexus 2000' revenues grew 150 percent.
This latest management shakeup in its data center business is part of a broader company initiative at Cisco that company CEO John Chambers is taking to reset its focus on profitable business lines. In addition to simplifying its management structure, Chambers shut down its Flip consumer camera business, cutting 500 jobs in the process.
Prior to taking on his new role at Cisco, Yen was executive vice president and general manager of Juniper Network's Fabric and Switching Business Group, where he lead Qfabric, the vendor's multiyear data center network research and development initiative. Before Juniper, Yen spent 20 years at Sun Microsystems, overseeing the development of Sun's first-and-second-generation multi-CPU servers.
For more:
- see the release
- Bloomberg has this article
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